Mosquitoes that were bred in a lab at ISCA Technologies hang upside down in a container as they feed on cow blood on Friday, Aug. 18, 2017. The Riverside based company is manufacturing new products to control mosquitoes. (Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Agenor Mafra-Neto, a former UC Riverside chemical ecologist, is the CEO and president of ISCA, which has developed three different strategies in battling mosquitoes.

The pesky insects are the deadliest animals on the planet, carrying such diseases as yellow and dengue fevers and the West Nile and Zika viruses. By far, the worst illness they spread is malaria. The World Health Organization said 200 million people were infected with the disease in 2015 and nearly half a million died.

Agenor Mafra-Neto, CEO/President of ISCA Technologies, stands in his lab where they breed mosquitoes. His Riverside based company is manufacturing new products to control the pests.<br />(Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Mafra-Neto’s focus when he established ISCA in 2000 was in agricultural pests. But he soon became interested in mosquitoes.

“In the early 2000s, dengue fever started exploding in Brazil,” said Mafra-Neto, a native of that country. “My family got dengue fever in the middle of Rio.”

When he started investigating mosquito control, he was surprised to find the most used chemical in fighting the insect was DDT, a pesticide banned in the United States in the 1970s.

“I said, ‘C’mon, something can be done better,’” he said.

In the interim, the company has developed three different methods of treating mosquitoes and is hoping to market at least two of them in the coming months. Much of the research has been funded by federal and private grants, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On Wednesday, Aug. 23, Mafra-Neto presented the results of the company’s research at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting and exposition in Washington, D.C.

The most promising of the three, Mafra-Neto said, is a product called Vectrax. It combines a pesticide with an odor that is attractive to mosquitoes. The odor is a combination of nectar scents that Mafra-Neto said are alluring to mosquitoes but not to honey bees.

He said the approach is a new one.

“There was this dogma that males only fed on plants and females feed on blood,” he said. But in the first few days of life, he added, “both males and females feed on nectar.”

He said the company, in cooperation with Tanzania’s National Institute for Medical Research, recently completed a field study in that east African nation. The study looked at eight villages in a mosquito-prone area. Houses in four of the villages, about 500 homes total, were treated along their roof lines with the pesticide compound. The other four villages were used as controls.

Prior to treatment, Mafra-Neto said, a survey recorded as many as 300 mosquitoes per room, per night, in the tiny homes. Residents had been relying on mosquito nets and other insecticides.

Mosquitoes in the treated homes dropped to near zero, he said.

“This is the most exciting (result) right now,” he said, “because we got it to work really well.”

In addition to the nectar-based compound, Mafra-Neto said another product combines a biodegradable wax with a pheromone compound and a larvicide. In semi-arid regions, the material is sprayed over areas where water collects when seasonal rains arrive. Once the rains come, the material rises to the water’s surface and kills mosquito larvae up to several weeks.

Another approach is what Mafra-Neto refers to as the Trojan cow. His company, he said, has developed a topical chemical that mimics the smell of humans. He said the product has not yet been tested, but he hopes by applying it to livestock, such as cows and goats penned adjacent to the homes of African villagers, mosquitoes might be more likely to feed on the blood of the animals, neither of which are susceptible to malaria.

In the past 15 years, worldwide cases of malaria have dropped by 60 percent. Mafra-Neto said it will take a combination of such approaches to make a difference in further reducing the number.

Even the Vectrax, he said, “is not going to work by itself. It’s going to work with bed nets and larvicides. It’s not a single silver bullet.”

But he believes the products can make a difference and help reduce the number malaria kills each year.

Compared to developing agricultural products, he said, “This is a more difficult area to go in. One of the reasons to go in this direction is it saves lives.”

Mark Muckenfuss has been a reporter since 1981. He worked at various publications including the San Bernardino Sun before coming to the Press Enterprise in 1999. He covers higher education, military affairs and, when the ground shakes, earthquakes.

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